By John Rogers
Marimba Inc, the former push technology pioneer which now bills itself as an application distribution and management concern, says its flagship Castanet product is quickly becoming the platform of choice for Fortune 1000 companies. The Mountain View, California-based company asserts the success of the Castanet product is evident in a slew of recent deals with Sun Microsystems Inc, Cytec Industries Inc, The Home Depot Inc, Intuit Inc, OnSale Inc, Nortel Networks Inc and Seagate Technology Inc.
Vice president of marketing Jacqueline Ross – herself hired from CheckPoint Software Technologies Inc to raise the profile of the company – says Marimba has been too quiet in the press for some time now. The message that Ross intends to deliver to the industry is that her company and its technology are for real despite the death of ‘push’ as a concept.
To that end, Marimba has offered a roadmap for its business which sees it moving into the market for distribution across extranets in addition to corporate intranets and its traditional internet environment. Ross says the Castanet platform now supports all development languages and applications, allowing it to distribute software across any network to any end point on any operating system.
Marimba also prides itself on the bandwidth efficiency and security features of its offering, as well as its ability to deliver both the software infrastructure and content. But with the ever-rising concept of the mobile workforce, disconnected users are key to Castanet’s appeal, Ross said. The idea that Marimba can offer a flexible delivery mechanism is borne out by the fact that, out of the seven customers cited above, three are deploying Castanet as an intranet only system, while two are using in an internet-only environment and two are deploying it both internally and externally.
Seagate for instance, has extended Castanet deployment to its outside distributors as well. Marimba hopes, through Castanet, to capture a fair share of the market for electronic software distribution that was worth $770m in 1997, a 40% growth rate from a year earlier. The company sees itself as handling a significant chunk of what it calls the internet services management business, which it defines as the infrastructure framework required to distribute, manage and maintain ongoing network services throughout the extended enterprise.
Marimba feels that its current offerings adequately address those needs, as well as the aforementioned bandwidth management and security concerns. Going forward, target markets for Castanet will be Fortune 1000 companies, internet service providers and application service providers – the growing number of companies which rent applications out on a per-seat basis.
Ross is quick to point out that Marimba is not going to be an ASP, but will concentrate on providing the infrastruture to deliver software anywhere. She wants Marimba to become ubiquitous in that space like Cisco, referring to that company’s claim that its systems handle the lion’s share of data flowing over the internet.
In line with its more forthcoming stance, Ross also offered a rare glimpse into the finances of the still-private company, saying that the company is on track to triple revenues from last year and saw $6m in orders and $5m in revenues last quarter. It must be noted, however, that 1998 is the first full year that Marimba has been shipping products. At those sales levels, the company is approaching profitability, according to Ross. It has raised $18.5m in two rounds of financing thus far and claims to be cash-strong, allowing it to plan its eventual initial public offering around the whims of the market.
